Jean Piaget,
the famous Swiss
developmental psychologist, began his
career as a biologist - specifically, a
malacologist, someone who studies molluscs!
But his interest in science and the history of science soon overtook
his
interest in snails and clams. As he delved deeper into the
thought-processes
of doing science, he became interested in the nature of thought itself,
especially in the development of thinking. Finding relatively
little
work done in the area, he had the opportunity to give it a label.
He called it genetic epistemology,
meaning the study of the
development
of knowledge.

He noticed, for example, that even infants have certain skills in
regard
to objects in their environment. These skills were certainly
simple
ones, sensori-motor skills, but they directed the way in which the
infant
explored his or her environment and so how they gained more knowledge
of
the world and more sophisticated exploratory skills. These skills
he called schemas.

For example, an infant knows how to grab his favorite rattle and
thrust
it into his mouth. He’s got that schema down pat. When he
comes
across some other object - say daddy’s expensive watch, he easily
learns
to transfer his “grab and thrust” schema to the new object. This
Piaget called assimilation, specifically assimilating a new
object
into an old schema.

When our infant comes across another object again - say a beach
ball - he will try his old schema of grab and thrust. This of
course
works poorly with the new object. So the schema will adapt to the
new object: Perhaps, in this example, “squeeze and drool” would
be
an appropriate title for the new schema. This is called
accommodation,
specifically accomodating an old schema to a new object.

Assimilation and accommodation are the two sides of adaptation,
Piaget’s term for what most of us would call learning. Piaget saw
adaptation, however, as a good deal broader than the kind of learning
that
Behaviorists in the US and Russia were talking about. He saw it
as a
fundamentally
biological process. Even one’s grip has to accommodate to a
stone,
while clay is assimilated into our grip. All living things adapt,
even without a nervous system or brain.

Learning

All learning ultimately boils down to association and
differentiation.
These are the two basic mechanisms of learning (and memory) that have
been
proposed over the centuries. Association is learning that two
somethings
go together. for example, we learn that spoons go with knives, cups go
with saucers, thunder follows lightning, pain follows injury, and so
on. Ivan Pavlov's famous classical conditioning is a simple
example: When a dog hears a bell each time he is fed, he will
begin to sallivate just upon hearing the bell, because food (and the
salivation it reflexively evokes) has become associated with the sound
of the bell.

Differentiation is learning to distinguish one something from
another, or pulling a figure out of a background. We learn that green,
not red, means go, that cats, not dogs,
have
sharp claws, that soft speech, not yelling, is approved of by one’s
elders,
that birds have feathers but reptiles don’t. Differentiation is a
matter
of improving the quality of one's phenomenal field by extracting some
detail
from the confusion, because that detail is important, is meaningful, to
the person.
This is, of course, the same thing as George Kelly's idea of
constructs:
As a child, the color of someone's skin may be irrelevant; later,
others
show the child that color is important. Color comes out of the
background;
black is differentiated from white; the contrast is learned.
Why?
Not, in this case, because the child has been shown a connection
between color and the quality of someone's character, but because a
child
cannot afford to ignore the differentiations his or her
"significant
others" make

It is clear that
association
and differentiation are two sides of the same coin, but sometimes one
is
more obvious, and sometimes the it’s the other.

We learn from our environment simply by being in it. This is
what E. C.
Tolman labelled latent
learning. But there are several
things that help us to retain associations and
differentiations:
The first is obvious: Repetition
or rehearsal. Practice
makes
perfect! Then there are things like vividness
and intensity:
We are
more likely to remember someone's name if they are loud and colorful
than
if they are quiet and ordinary. And finally we have conditioning,
that is, associating the whole association or differentiation
with
something that motivates
us, whether it be food, companionship, money, a sense of pride, a fear
of pain, or whatever.

Learning is also enhanced when the
differentiations or associations
involved have direct relevance to the individual's needs, that is, when
learning is meaningful to
that individual.
As long as teachers insist on forcing material that, from the
students'
perspective, has no relevance to them or their lives, education will be
a arduous process. It is curious that a boy who can't remember
the
times tables can remember baseball statistics back to the stone age, or
a girl who can't write a coherent paragraph can tell
stories
that would make Chaucer proud. If calculus or Shakespeare or any
number of subjects we feel children should learn seem to be so
difficult
for them, it is not necessarily because the children are dumb. It
is because
they don't see any reason for learning them. Teachers must get to
know their students, because the motivation to learn is "inside" them,
in their phenomenal fields and phenomenal selves.

The simplest kind of learning, which we share with all animals, we
could
call environmental: On the
basis of your present understanding
or
knowledge, you anticipate certain things or act in a certain way - but
the world doesn't meet with your expectations. So, after various other
anticipations and actions, you adapt, develop a new understanding, gain
new knowledge. Environmental
conditioning adds a positive or
negative
consequence to the learning that stamps it in: You run, expecting
a 100 yards of open field, when you suddenly smack into a tree you
hadn't noticed. You will be more careful in the future!

For a social animal, much of this learning comes from others -- i.e.
it is social conditioning,
also known as rewards and punishments.
So, instead of learning not to run across streets by getting run-over,
you learn by getting punished as you begin to run across the street.
Or,
instead of learning sex roles by accident (!), you are gently shaped by
signs of social approval: “My, aren’t you pretty!” or “Here’s my little
man!"

For example, if every time your run into
a tree your head
hurts,
you will stop running into the tree. On the other hand, if every
time you say "shit!" your dad hits you upside the head, you may stop...
or you may avoid dad, say shit under your breath, begin to hate your
father
and authority in general, start beating up little kids after school,
and
so on, until prison effectively stops the behavior. These kind of
things seldom happen with trees.

Social learning includes vicarious
learning (noticing
and
recalling the kinds of environmental feedback and social conditioning
other
people get) and imitation (or
what Abert Bandura called modeling).
This
kind of learning is probably the most significant for the development
of
personality. It can be either conscious, as when we are watching
an artist to learn their technique, or unconscious, as when we grow up
to be disconcertingly like our parents.

Of the hundreds of studies Albert Bandura
was responsible for, one
group
stands
out above the others -- the bobo doll
studies. He made of
film of one of his students, a young woman, essentially beating up a
bobo
doll. In case you don’t know, a bobo doll is an inflatable,
egg-shape
balloon creature with a weight in the bottom that makes it bob back up
when you knock him down. Nowadays, it might have Darth Vader
painted
on it, but back then it was simply “Bobo” the clown.

The woman punched the clown, shouting “sockeroo!” She kicked
it,
sat on it, hit with a little hammer, and so on, shouting various
aggressive
phrases. Bandura showed his film to groups of kindergartners who,
as you might predict, liked it a lot. They then were let out to
play.
In the play room, of course, were several observers with pens and
clipboards
in hand, a brand new bobo doll, and a few little hammers.

And you might predict as well what the observers recorded: A
lot
of little kids beating the daylights out of the bobo doll. They
punched
it and shouted “sockeroo,” kicked it, sat on it, hit it with the little
hammers, and so on. In other words, they imitated the young lady
in the film, and quite precisely at that.

Finally, there’s verbal learning
- learning not from the
environment
or the behavior of others, but from words. Culturally, this is,
of
course, a highly significant form of learning. Most of the
learning
we do in our many many years of schooling is verbal. And yet we
don’t
know that much about it at all!

One thing is certain: The old models of the rat with his
conditioned and shaped behavior, and of the computer with its
programming, are not very good ones. If you really need a simple
metaphor for human learning, you are better off thinking of people -
especially children - as sponges!

Remembering and forgetting

Remembering (often called retrieval in research
literature)
comes in two forms:
recall and recognition. Recognition is
the easier one: We recognize our friend when we see him coming down the
road. Recall is more effortful, and involves mentally rebuilding the
experience.
It is a myth that we have everything in our heads like a motion
picture.
Really, we only have a certain amount of “information” in the
form
of neural connections, which we use to reconstruct our
memories.

There is a degree to which we tend to forget things as we get older,
and there is some loss of neurons as we age. And there are drugs (such
as alcohol) and diseases (such as Alzheimer's) that can
speed
that loss along. Amnesia is
what we call the more sudden loses of memory, whether temporary or
permanent. The most dramatic examples occur after serious trauma
to the head such as sometimes occur with car accidents or gun shots to
the head. The usual kind of amnesia is called retrograde amnesia,
where you can't
remember past events. It is usually episodic memory (memories of
events in your life, or even of your identity). We seem to retain
things like our skills, the ability to speak, definitions of words, and
so on.

Anterograde amnesia, on the
other hand, means you can't make new memories. This is a rare
condition and is due to damage to the hippocampus, a part of the limbic
system that is found on both sides of the thalamus, underneath the
temporal lobes of the cerebrum. A person with
anterograde amnesia remembers their past, but will lose his or her
experience of all new events in a matter of minutes. If you
introduce yourself and have a nice conversation with such a person,
then leave and come back ten minutes later, they will act as if they
had never met you. In their minds, they never have! A good
movie that plays on this is Memento.
But there is nothing amusing about this disorder. Most of these
people wind up in an institution, living each day as if it were the
first since their accident.

Most of our day-to-day forgetting seems to be a matter
of interference. In other words, there is so much stuff in your
head that it is hard to separate one thing from another. It's
like
trying to find something in a particularly messy attic: It's not
that the stuff isn't there somewhere, it's just that you can't access
it, sort of like how its hard to find things
when
your hard-drive is stuffed full of files, or your room is filled with
junk.

One of the biggest controversies in psychology today concerns
repression.
Repression is the idea, promoted by Sigmund Freud, that we push painful
memories out of our awareness and into a deep, dark place called "the
unconscious
mind." This is why traditionally we talk about going to a therapist to
try to recover these traumatic memories so we can deal with them. There
have even been some therapists who use hypnosis to recover repressed
memories.

Unfortunately, some of the people who remembered terrible things
like
being abused as children were discovered to have created these
memories
under pressure (unintentional, we hope) from their therapists! Some
parents were even sent to
jail
because of their adult children's “recovered memories.” But research
indicates that not
only is there very little evidence of repressed traumatic memories, but
trauma - with its emotional intensity - actually makes memories
harder to forget!

Of course, people really do get abused, and other traumatic things
do
happen to people. There have been people who have recovered memories
and whose
memories have been confirmed. So it is a difficult issue that has yet
to
be decided.

Memories are not like the recordings you might make with a video
camera. Outside
information
may alter our memories as we reconstruct them. Some people are
easily
manipulated, and everyone can be manipulated to some degree.
This
happens, for example, when a lawyer asks you what happened when you saw
the accused’s car “crash” into his client’s car - when in fact it
merely
bumped into it. Hearing the word "crash" tends to subtly alter your
recollection
in the direction the lawyer wants it to. Hypnosis is especially
powerful
when it comes to altering memories. So are drugs. And children are very
susceptible to manipulation. This is why children’s testimony in court
is rarely accepted.

Constructs

A number of psychologists, most notably Gestalt psychologists,
suggest that we begin life with differentiation. First you see a lot of
undifferentiated
"stuff" going on (a "buzzing, blooming confusion," as William James
called
it). Then you learn to pick out of that "stuff" the things that are
important,
that make a difference, that have meaning for you. This approach
was also taken by George Kelly.
He starts with what he called dichotomy
corollary: "A person's construction system is composed of
a
finite number of
dichotomous
constructs."

Kelly called the basic building blocks of meaning
constructs: We cut up
the world into little pieces, we separate
this from that, we
make differentiations. There are many other names we could
use:
contrasts, concepts, percepts, categories, dimensions, and so on, all
with slightly differing meanings. Kelly
also
referred to them as "useful concepts," "convenient fictions," and
"transparent
templates." You "place" these "templates" on the world, and they guide
your perceptions and behaviors. But they all ultimately refer
to
this process of making one into two: more or less; it's this or
it's
that; there are two kinds of people in the world; it's them or us; it's
got to be one or the other; it's black or white; please answer, yes or
no; what goes up must come down.

He often calls them personal
constructs, emphasizing the
fact
that they are yours and yours alone, unique to you and no-one else. A
construct
is not some label or pigeon-hole or dimension that I, as a
psychologist, lay
on you with my fancy personality tests. It is a small bit of how you
see the
world.

He also calls them bipolar
constructs, to emphasize their
dichotomous
nature. They have two ends, or poles: Where there is thin,
there
must be fat, where there is tall, there must be short, where there is
up,
there must be down, and so on. If everyone were fat, then fat would
become
meaningless, or identical in meaning to "everyone." Some people must be
skinny in order for fat to have any meaning, and vice versa!

This is actually a very old insight. In ancient China, for example,
philosophers made much of yin and yang, the opposites that together
make
the whole. More recently, Carl Jung talked about it a great deal.
Linguists
and anthropologists accept it as a given part of language and culture.

Most of the time, we use only one end or the other of a contrast at
a time. These ends are called characteristics or, especially in
reference
to the characteristics of people, traits. But the
other
end is always there, lurking in the background.

Many constructs have names or are easily nameable: good-bad,
happy-sad, introvert-extravert, flourescent-incandescent.... But they
need
not be verbal: My cat
knows
the difference between the expensive cat food and the cheap stuff, yet
can't tell you about it; an infant contrasts between mommy and
non-mommy;
wild animals contrast safe areas and dangerous ones, etc.

Probably, most of our constructs are non-verbal. Even
adult
humans sometimes "just know" without being about to say - unconscious
contrasts, if you like: Think of
all
the habits that you have that you don't name, such as the detailed
movements
involved in driving a car. Think about the things you recognize but
don't
name, such as the formation just beneath your nose? (It's called a
"philtrum".)
Or what is it about that person that you
like
or dislike? Or think about all the subtleties of a feeling like
"falling in love." Constructs with names are more easily thought
about.
They are certainly more easily talked about! It's as if a name is a
handle
by which you can grab onto a construct, move it around, show it to
others,
and so on. And yet a construct that has no name is still "there," and
can
have every bit as great an effect on your life!

One more differentiation Kelly makes in regards to constructs is
between
peripheral and core constructs. Peripheral
constructs are
most constructs about the world, others, and even one's self.
Core
constructs, on the other hand, are the constructs that are most
significant
to you, that to one extent or another actually define who you
are.
Write down the first 10 or 20 adjectives that occur to you about
yourself
-- these may very well represent core constructs. Core constructs
is the closest Kelly comes to talking about a self.

Mental
structures

Constructs don't just float around independently, either. We
interrelate
and organize them. For example, we can define a
category:
"Women are adult female human beings." Or we can go a step
further
and organize things into taxonomies, those tree-like
structures
we come across in biology: A Siamese is a kind of cat, which is a
kind of carnivore, which is a kind of mammal, which is a kind of
vertebrate....

Kelly has the organization
corollary:
"Each person characteristically
evolves, for his convenience in
anticipating
events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between
constructs." Constructs are not just floating around unconnected.
If they were,
you
wouldn't be able to use one piece of information to get to another --
you
wouldn't be able to anticipate! When you are talked into a blind date,
and your friend spends a great deal of energy trying to convince you
that
the person you will be going out with has a "great personality", you
know,
you just know, that they will turn out to look like Quasimodo. How do
you
get from "great personality" to "Quasimodo?" Organization!

Some constructs are subordinate
to, or "under," other
constructs.
There are two versions of this. First, there's a taxonomic kind of
subordination,
like the "trees" of animal or plant life you learned in high school
biology.
There are living things vs. non-living things, for example; subordinate
to living things are, say, plants vs. animals; under plants, there
might
be trees vs. flowers; under trees, there might be conifers vs.
deciduous
trees; and so on.

Mind you, these are personal constructs, not scientific constructs,
and so this is a personal taxonomy as well. It may be the same as the
scientific
one in your biology textbook, or it might not be. I still tend to have
a species of conifer called "Christmas trees".

animals -- plants
| flowers -- trees

|

deciduous --
conifers

|

Christmas
trees
--
others

There is also a definitional kind of subordination, called
constellation.
This involves stacks of constructs, with all their poles aligned. For
example,
beneath the construct conifers vs. deciduous trees, we may find
soft-wood
vs. hard-wood, needle-bearing vs. leaf-bearing, cone-bearing vs.
flower-bearing,
and so on.

This is also the basis for stereotyping: "We" are good, clean,
smart,
moral, etc., while "they" are bad, dirty, dumb, immoral, etc.

Many constructs, of course, are independent of each other.
Plants-animals
is independent of flourescent-incandescent, to give an obvious
example.

We can also put constructs into more temporal structures, like rules. These are often called
schemas or scripts. You can find
explicit
examples in books about card games, etiquette, or grammar; but you know
quite a few rule systems yourself, even if they have become so
automatic
as to be unconscious!

There are also narratives
- the stories we have in our
minds.
These are temporal, like rules, but are amazingly flexible. They
can be a matter of remembered personal experiences, or memorized
history
lessons, or pure fiction. I have a suspicion that these
contribute
greatly to our sense of identity, and that animals don't have them to
the
degree we do.

Sometimes, the relationship between two constructs is very tight.
If one construct is consistently used to predict another, you have
tight
construction. Prejudice would be an example: As soon as you have a
label
for someone, you automatically assume other things about that person as
well. You "jump to conclusions."

When we "do" science, we need to use tight construction. We call
this
"rigorous thinking," and it is a good thing. Who, after all, would want
an engineer to build bridges using scientific rules that only maybe
work.
People who think of themselves as realistic often prefer tight
construction.

But it is a small step from rigorous and realistic to rigid. And
this
rigidity can become pathological, so that an obsessive-compulsive
person
has to do things "just so" or break out in anxiety.

On the other hand, sometimes the relationship between constructs is
left loose: There is a
connection, but it is not absolute, not
quite
necessary. Loose construction is a more flexible way of using
constructs.
When we go to another country, for example, we might have some
preconceptions
about
the people. These preconceptions would be prejudicial stereotypes, if
we
construed them tightly. But if we use them loosely, they merely help us
to behave more appropriately in their culture.

One example of loose construction is when describe something:
"Women are delicate."
As
the example is intended to suggest, descriptions, as opposed to
definitions,
need not be true! Beliefs are similar to, but looser
than, taxonomies. Whereas birds definitely (i.e. by definition)
are
vertebrates and have feathers, it is only my belief that they all fly -
I could be wrong! Stereotypes are examples of beliefs; so are
opinions.
But some beliefs are so strongly held that we see them as definite.

We use loose construction when we fantasize and dream, when
anticipations
are broken freely and odd combinations are permitted. However, if we
use
loose construction too often and inappropriately, we appear flaky
rather
than flexible. Taken far enough, loose construction will land you in an
institution.

The creativity cycle makes
use of these ideas. When we are
being
creative, we first loosen our constructions - fantasizing and
brainstorming
alternative constructions. When we find a novel construction that looks
like it has some potential, we focus on it and tighten it up. We use
the
creativity cycle (obviously) in the arts. First we loosen up and get
creative
in the simplest sense; then tighten things up and give our creations
substance.
We conceive the idea, then give it form.

We use the creativity cycle in therapy, too. We let go of our
unsuccessful
models of reality, let our constructs drift, find a novel
configuration,
pull it into more rigorous shape, and try it out!

The range corollary
tell us that "A construct is convenient for the
anticipation of a finite range of
events only." No construct is useful for everything. The gender
construct
(male-female)
is, for most of us, something of importance only with people and a few
higher animals such as our pets and cattle. Few of us care what sex
flies
are, or lizards, or even armadillos. And no-one, I think, applies
gender
to geological formations or political parties. These things are beyond
the range of convenience of the gender construct.

Some constructs are very comprehensive,
or broad in
application.
Good-bad is perhaps the most comprehensive construct of all, being
applicable
to nearly anything. Other constructs are very incidental, or
narrow.
Flourescent-incandescent is fairly narrow, applicable only to light
bulbs.

But notice that what is relatively narrow for you might be
relatively
broad
for me. A biologist will be interested in the gender of flies, lizards,
armadillos, apple trees, philodendra, and so on. Or a philosopher may
restrict
his or her use of good-bad to specifically moral behaviors, rather than
to all kinds of things, people, or beliefs.

The modulation corollary
says
"The variation in a person's
construction system is limited by the
permeability
of the constructs within whose range of convenience the variants
lie. Some constructs are "springy," they "modulate," they are
permeable,
which means that they are open to increased range. Other constructs are
relatively impermeable.

For example, good-bad is generally quite permeable for most of us.
We
are always adding new elements: We may never have seen a computer
before,
or an iPod, or a thumb drive, but as soon as we have, we want to
know
the best brand to buy. Likewise, a person who will look around for a
rock
if a hammer is not available uses the construct concerning "things to
hammer
with" in a permeable fashion.

On the other hand, flourescent-incandescent is relatively
impermeable:
It can be used for lighting, but little else is likely to ever be
admitted.
And people who won't let you sit on tables are keeping their sit-upon
constructs
quite impermeable.

In case this seems like another way of talking about incidental vs.
comprehensive constructs, note that you can have comprehensive but
impermeable
constructs, such as the one expressed by the person who says "Whatever
happened to the good old days? There just don't seem to be any honest
people
around anymore." In other words, honesty, though broad, is now closed.
And there are incidental constructs used permeably, such as when you
say
"my, but you're looking incandescent today!" Permeability is the very
soul
of poetry!

When there is no more "stretch," no more "give" in the range of the
constructs you are using, you may have to resort to more drastic
measures.
Dilation
is
when you broaden the range of your constructs. Let's say you don't
believe
in ESP. You walk into a party and suddenly you hear a voice in your
head
and notice someone smiling knowingly at you from across the room! You
would
have to rather quickly stretch the range of the constructs involving
ESP,
which had been filled, up to now, with nothing but a few hoaxes.

On the other hand, sometimes events force you to narrow the range of
your constructs equally dramatically. This is called constriction.
An example might be when, after a lifetime of believing that people
were
moral creatures, you experience the realities of war. The construct
including
"moral" may shrink out of existence.

Notice that dilation and constriction are rather emotional things.
You
can easily understand depression and manic states this way. The manic
person
has dilated a set of constructs about his or her happiness enormously,
and shouts "I've never imagined that life could be like this before!"
Someone
who is depressed, on the other hand, has taken the constructs that
relate
to life and good things to do with it and constricted them down to
sitting
alone in the dark.

Finally, there's the choice
corollary:
"A person chooses for himself that
alternative in a dichotomized
construct
through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and
definition of his system." With all these constructs, and all
these poles, how do we chose our
behaviors? Kelly says that we will choose to do what we anticipate will
most likely elaborate our construction system, that is,
improve
our understanding, our ability to anticipate. Reality places limits on
what we can experience or do, but we choose how to construe, or
interpret,
that reality. And we choose to interpret that reality in whatever way
we
believe will help us the most.

Commonly, our choices are between an adventurous alternative and a
safe
one. We could try to extend our understanding of, say, human social
interaction ("partying") by making the adventurous choice of
going
to more parties, getting to know more people, developing more
relationships,
and so on.

On the other hand, we might prefer to define our understanding by
making
the security choice: staying
home, pondering what might have
gone
wrong with that last unsuccessful relationship, or getting to know one
person better. Which one you choose will depend on which one you think
you need.

With all this choosing going on, you might expect that Kelly has had
something to say about free will vs. determinism. He has, and what he
has
to say is very interesting: He sees freedom as being a relative
concept.
We are not "free" or "unfree;" Some of us are free-er than others; We
are
free-er in some situations than in others; We are free-er from some
forces
than from others; And we are free-er under some constructions than
under
others. We will look into the idea of freedom later.

Inferences

One example of how we actually use constructs - at least those that
have words attached to them -
is describe a person to someone. We
then begin to deal with them socially before we actually meet
them!
They, in fact, could be long dead, and yet we can get to know them to
some degree.
Each word or phrase we give or hear narrows the range of possible
expectations
a little more. "He's male." So what. "He's male, in
his
50s,
chubby, a professor of psychology, kinda odd..." Oh, I think know
who
you
mean.
"He wears jeans with suspenders." Bingo! The more that is said,
the more precise the anticipations.

Just like any other constructs, our social constructs are organized
to some degree so that we can make inferences from one construct to
another. Usually, this means going
from
a fairly obvious characteristic to one that is more "abstract," hidden,
or uncertain. For example, when you see a person in a lab coat
with
a stethoscope around her neck and a certain kind of diploma on the
wall,
you might infer that this person is a physician. Or if you see
someone
being rude to someone else, you might infer that she is obnoxious, that
is, has some inner trait that will lead her to be rude in other
situations
and might involve other behaviors as well.

Note that some of our inferences are more a matter of definitions,
and
others are more a matter of beliefs. Certain college degrees, for
example, are crucial to who is or isn't a doctor; their manner of
dress,
or their bedside manners, might be important, but are not crucial.

There are several different bases for the inferences we make:

(1) A smile is usually correctly understood as an indication
of
happiness because smiles seem to be a part of our biology. There is no culture in the
world that does not understand the smile,
though
many misuse and pervert that understanding.

(2) "The finger" is understood, in our culture, as an
indication
of contempt, because it is a part of our cultural communications
system. Language, gestures, clothing, social ritual,
occupation,
and much of body language is cultural.

(3) Being female has been, in our culture, traditionally
assumed
to imply poor mechanical ability. This assumption, of course, has
lead parents to discourage the development of mechanical abilities in
their
daughters: Why bother? The inference is, therefore, a
self-fulfilling prophecy. The
expectation creates itself!

(4) Finally, many of our inferences don't really work at
all.
They are perpetuated because we often ignore or deny contradictions -
perhaps they are threatening to us - or the contradictions simply
don't
show up well, as when we have little contact with some category of
people.
We could call these superstitious
inferences.

In linguistics, it is said that language is
generative.
That means that, with a small set of words and a small set of rules of
grammar, you can create (generate) a potentially infinite set of
meaningful
sentences. Well, this generativity is characteristic of all human
activity. This means that, no matter how many contrasts you can
relate
about a chubby professor or whatever, there are still an infinite
number
of possible characteristics or behaviors that the 50-ish professor can
generate. That professor, in other words, can still surprise you!

Since we are still "built" to try to anticipate him, we try one more
thing: We try to anticipate others by putting ourselves into our
anticipations! We make the assumption that they will do what we
would
do if we were in their situation and in the kinds of pigeon-holes we
have
placed them in. I call this "the assumption of empathic
understanding."

This seems to be such a strong tendency in human beings that we
often
do it when we are trying to anticipate non-human beings and
things.
We tend to be anthropomorphic in our dealings with animals,
for example. I tend to see my cat as being manipulative,
Machiavellian,
even sociopathic when, in fact, she doesn't have the I.Q. of a bean
sprout.
We even attribute "souls" to non-living things, which is called animism.
So our ancestors attempted to appease angry volcanoes, or give
thanks
for the generosity of the earth, and so on.